


kermit

by TheTartWitch



Category: Original Work
Genre: Denial, Gen, Grief, I don't know what else to put here, Short Drabble
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-20
Updated: 2018-12-20
Packaged: 2019-09-23 15:36:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 818
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17083019
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheTartWitch/pseuds/TheTartWitch
Summary: His soul lives with Maman; his empty shell lives with Rita and drags groceries out of the car at six am.





	kermit

The ceiling is the sort of dry, cracked texture you’d expect to see on a dehydrated person’s lips, or the face of someone who’s wearing way too much makeup. He lays on his back on the couch and studies it, looking for faces in the paint. Maman always said the faces in cracks are the people who died and got stuck in them, and sometimes you have to help them hammer their way to freedom, preferably with an actual hammer. Maman lives in an assisted living center now, and they don’t let her near  _ any _ kind of blunt instrument after she took offense to the artistic spirals in the fourth floor’s walls. 

“Kermit! Kermit, would you help me bring in the groceries?” Rita is in charge of him now. She says she was always in charge of him, that he doesn’t live with Maman anymore, but he doesn’t care. His soul lives with Maman; his empty shell lives with Rita and drags groceries out of the car at six am. Rita is a stranger, an alien, a government agent tasked with watching him until his real relatives return to take him on drug-fueled adventures.

“Kermit,” she says. She’s standing over him, peering down at him through fake sunglasses. He can see straight up her nose; she’s blocking his view of a particularly lovely ceiling-crack woman. She must have somehow gotten all the groceries inside without his help. He knew she could do it. “Kermit, have you been here all day? It’s almost eight!” She sounds more exasperated than worried. He knew she was a government agent in disguise. He blinks at her. His eyes slowly slide over to watch a steadily-expanding watermark on the ceiling. She follows his gaze and shrieks, running for the stairs. 

“Kermit!” She screams from the upstairs bathroom, “You left the sink running! Kermit!” The water shuts off with a house-wide sigh. He doesn’t feel too bad about it; he hasn’t been in that bathroom all day.  _ He  _ didn’t leave anything running. Besides, Maman used to say caging a natural force like water in plastic underground tubing was obstructing the natural way of things, and once flooded two past houses by turning all the faucets on and letting them go. She’d planned to flood the world, had made a makeshift boat and everything, but the neighbors caught her before she could throw it off the roof and jump in. 

Rita says Maman is crazy and that he shouldn’t listen to her, but Maman had never lied to him. Rita doesn’t see the world the way they do, doesn’t hear the voices in the walls begging for release or see the rising flood just over the next hill. She doesn’t see the school bus rats or the way Nelson Bern and Terry Parker looked at each other when they thought no one was looking. She doesn’t see any of that, and how can she say she loves him when she’s never tasted the feeling like fizzing candy in her mouth? 

Maman did. Maman never demanded he do things like eat school lunch or go to bed before the sun set or ignore the way their neighbors tied their dog up outside the whole day for a week. Rita does. Rita doesn’t understand why he lets balloons float away to their star brothers or makes himself sandwiches from leftover chocolate and spinach or counts the number of toothbrushes in their house every night because sometimes sprites need toothbrushes too. She doesn’t understand and she wants it to stop but he won’t because letting go of the quirky things Maman taught him means letting go of everything she meant to him and he won’t. He can’t. His body has become a safe, combinations of colors and shapes protecting their conversations and good memories. 

“Kermit,” says Rita. She’s holding the card he’d thrown away. He wonders when she came back downstairs; he didn’t hear her normally deafening footsteps. “Kermit, even if you avoid it it’s not going to go away, and don’t you want to say goodbye one last time?”

He doesn’t want to say goodbye. That’s why he threw the paper in the trash, stupid Rita. He rolls over, away from her. The back of the couch is a faded brown like dead grass. He hates it immediately. 

“Well,” she huffs, “ _ I’m _ going.” Like an ultimatum, like what she does or says will have any effect on his decisions, like he’ll somehow suddenly realize she’s been right all along and hop to his feet, ready to go. She’s lying to herself. He won’t let her lie to him. 

There’s a small, extended silence. She’s waiting for him to speak. He doesn’t. 

Finally she sighs. There’s the sound of the card hitting the wooden table next to him.

“ _ I’m _ going to her funeral,” Rita says, her voice thick. He doesn’t breath. “Maman would have wanted you to go.”


End file.
